Now we have to tolerate disgruntled Arab/Emirati sheiks attempting to kick Australia out of the Asian Football Confederation. Not to put too fine a point on this, and no, I’m not an avid sports follower, it’s clear too me that the Arab teams were simply not good enough, and all the oil money in the world can’t buy (or manufacture) talent.

There are winners and grinners, and the rest are also rans. And some of those are just poor losers!

Late last year a United States law framed in the name of world peace quietly reached its long arm into a small Melbourne tribunal, persuading it to let a large armaments manufacturer override Australian human rights legislation.

In a decision that went largely unremarked upon, the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) agreed to let Thales Australia Ltd and its subsidiary ADI Munitions discriminate racially against their employees, job applicants and contract workers.

The companies won a five-year exemption from six sections of the Equal Opportunity Act so they could comply with stringent US export laws that describe who can and who cannot have access to American military technology and know-how.

Simon Rice, an Australian National University law professor, could only sigh. He is an almost lone voice against the Americans’ capacity for such strongarm tactics in Australian courts.

“It’s legal imperialism,” says Rice, who chairs the ACT Law Reform Advisory Council. “It’s the US saying to everybody in the world: You will deal with us on the terms we will dictate to you.”

There have been scores of such decisions in small courts across the nation since at least 2003, when the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Tribunal granted Boeing Australia Holdings some of the first such exemptions.

This means the workforce is segregated, so that the “wrong” people are not given certain positions, as spelt out by ITAR.

Because the Australian government relies heavily on US military technology, the big defence manufacturers operating here have, for more than a decade, made a practice of applying for exemptions from our equal opportunity laws so they can stay sweet with the US State Department. All applications, except one in Queensland, have been granted, allowing the companies to bar access to certain employees and contractors to positions where they would have access to sensitive US military goods and services.

This means the workforce is segregated, so that the “wrong” people are not given certain positions, as spelt out by the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), according to Rice, who advises our federal parliamentary human rights committee.

Because the ITAR, which governs the terms with which an importing country can use American defence technology, requires companies to discriminate on the basis of birth or nationality, it conflicts directly with Australian state and territory human rights legislation. Companies either persuade our legal authorities to let them off the hook or they don’t get US State Department clearance to access exported US defence technology.

“It is easier for the companies to get a local exemption than to get this clearance,” explains Rice.

Some people are outright denied access to sensitive American defence exports because their country of birth or dual nationality is on an ITAR list of “proscribed” nations.

The list changes from time to time and barred nations currently include Afghanistan, China, Cuba, Cyprus, Fiji, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Syria and Vietnam – the ancestral homes of many Australian migrants.

Competitive advantage

There was a salient reminder this week of the reasons for US nervousness over technology security. Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed via German magazine Der Spiegel that Chinese spies had stolen design plans for the Joint Strike Fighter, the aircraft meant to reinforce US aerial dominance. Australia is spending billions of dollars on the same planes.

American lawyers specialising in export laws have described the ITAR as unparalleled in scope, as it reaches across the entire globe. It’s not just about arms, but a whole gamut of hardware and software used for military purposes or space research. It includes ships, planes, lasers and satellite technology, and “export” can simply mean transferring information – even, possibly, according to one analyst, sending an email.

Australia’s foremost specialist in space law, Professor Steven Freeland of the University of Western Sydney, sees extra benefits beyond national security for the US as it enforces the ITAR to regulate who can use American satellite technology.

“In the area of space technology, the US are still the superpower and they want to stay there, despite developments in China and Russia, so they’re very sensitive about their weapons technology going to other countries,” he tells The Saturday Paper. “In its simplest terms, space technology is regarded as akin to missile technology.”

While the ITAR has a benevolent motive in wanting to stop sensitive technology falling into the wrong hands, it also has the effect of enabling the US to retain a competitive advantage, he says.

“You won’t find that motivation explicitly in the official documents,” Freeland says.

However, he is less worried than Rice about ITAR’s reach.

“It’s quite common where people are dealing with national security issues to say: Sorry, but we get to choose the sort of people who work there because we don’t want them to have access,” he says.

Rice argues that the state department is dictating the private behaviour of individuals and companies outside the US, causing them to act unlawfully in their own countries.

Fines and jail terms

The state department can fine offending individuals and businesses up to $US1 million per violation for breaching ITAR requirements. It can ban companies from using American military exports and jail offenders for up to 10 years.

In a case that sent a message to universities, John Reece Roth, a former Tennessee professor of electrical engineering, was jailed for four years in 2009 for breaching the ITAR by providing information on drone technology to students from Iran and China.

Boeing was fined $US3.8 million in 2001, $US15 million in 2006 and $US3 million in 2008 for ITAR breaches and other companies have also been hit hard.

By comparison, breaches here of Australian anti-discrimination and equal opportunity law may lead to an apology or “small value financial compensation”, Australian defence industry lawyer Jane Elise Bates pointed out in the journal Security Challenges in 2012.

“From an economic perspective the balance is certainly in favour of continuing the status quo and seeking exemptions as required to permit the conduct of racial discrimination,” Bates wrote.

In the latest decision granting Thales Australia exemptions in November, VCAT member Anna Dea said the company’s work for the Australian Defence Force, including ship, aircraft, vehicle and munitions manufacture, generates more than $861 million in annual sales. It employs 871 people in Victoria, with an estimated $2 billion worth of projects lined up over the next eight to 10 years.

Dea listed the same reasons that have persuaded nearly every Australian decision-maker in her position for the past decade or so to grant exemptions, faced with the brutal reality of the US ITAR. The company’s work is important to Australia’s defence capability, the state economy and jobs that could otherwise go elsewhere, she said. She noted that no employees or union representatives made any submissions to the tribunal.

But it was not always so.

When Thales and ADI sought similar exemptions in the State Administrative Tribunal of Western Australia in 2005, the commissioner for equal opportunity, the WA Trades and Labour Council, the state’s Ethnic Communities Council and Western Australians for Racial Equality all objected.

The companies won a five-year exemption anyway.

As Australia negotiated a new defence treaty with the US in 2008, judges and decision-makers for a while bridled at having to bow to American law, after a parliamentary committee recommended the federal government seek exemptions from the ITAR.

In 2007, the then VCAT president, Justice Stuart Morris, voiced his concern about being asked by Boeing Australia Holdings to depart from local legislation to provide jobs.

“Such a departure is only sought because important aerospace technology is subject to an American law which places American security ahead of this human rights standard. One might ask: why should not the Americans give way?” he said.

“One suspects that the ITAR is misconceived … But then, I rather doubt that the United States government will back down from ITAR in the face of a decision of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal.”

VCAT deputy president Cate McKenzie described the nationality-based prohibitions in the ITAR as a “blunt instrument” when she granted a partial exemption to BAE Systems Australia Limited in 2008.

“Assessment of individuals on a non-stereotyped basis, or training and education about the importance of the obligation of secrecy, would seem to me to be a better approach,” she said.

Little choice for legal bodies

At the end of 2008, the president of the Queensland Anti-Discrimination Tribunal, Douglas Savage, refused exemptions sought by the Boeing group. The companies’ opportunities should not be at the expense of employees or potential employees, said Savage, whose decision still stands.

He doubted that refugees who had risked their lives to flee nations whose regimes they opposed were a security concern. Any concern could equally apply to US or Australian citizens, he said.

Rice sees such opposition as having faded. In particular, although they have appeared in past hearings, he is disappointed at unions’ failure to take this on as a cause.

“They haven’t been very effective or strategic in their arguments,” he says.

Four years ago, Rice argued in The Canberra Law Review that courts and tribunals in reality “have had little real choice, in the face of employers’ (poorly substantiated) claims that without the exemption the defence contracts will be breached with serious consequences, including the loss of jobs.”

There have been at least 25 more decisions allowing exemptions since he wrote that. Thirteen were in New South Wales, where there are no public hearings and exemptions are gazetted by the attorney-general. Two were in the ACT, two in Victoria, six in South Australia and one in Western Australia.

“I’ve been waiting for one tribunal to break ranks,” says Rice. “It seems to me they’re spooked. They’re between a rock and a hard place. You have to have sympathy. This is a political issue. The tribunals are being asked to decide it and they shouldn’t be.”

However, tribunals should be more rigorous in making these self-interested businesses spell out the exact consequences if they complied with local human rights laws, Rice says.

Canadian example

The tough US laws are unpopular around the world, particularly with close allies such as Canada, and the Obama administration recently tweaked them. But as VCAT’s Anna Dea explained in her most recent Thales decision, “it remains the case that information about a workforce member’s nationality and national origin is still required”.

Freeland acknowledges the role of US domestic politics. “Americans are very good at protecting US interests. It’s what you pay your politicians for, in one sense,” he says.

“We may not like it, but if the American administration were not seen to protect US interests, it wouldn’t last long in government. Americans have a particularly patriotic or provincial view that the US is the centre of the universe.”

Canada, accustomed to its gigantic pushy neighbour, has over the past few years negotiated changes with the US State Department that allow companies to comply with the ITAR as well as Canadian privacy and human rights legislation.

The Canadian government acted following public controversies, including a ruckus when General Motors Canada sent immigrant workers home with pay after the company was fined $US20 million for breaching the ITAR when it manufactured certain military vehicles.

There is no such outcry here. Instead, Freeland says, Australian governments continue to tolerate the ITAR’s workings because of the trade-off of lucrative business investment.

The president of Asia’s football governing body says Gulf nations want the Socceroos expelled from the continental confederation.

Sheikh Salman Bin Ebrahim Al-Khalifa

This was always going to happen. As Australia flexed its sporting muscle in the Asian Cup, there were always going to be people who would say we’re not welcome.

What no one expected is that the boss of Asian Football would echo those sorts of comments on the evening before the final of a hugely successful Asian Cup tournament hosted on Australian soil. But reports have emerged overnight that in an interview with a Dubai newspaper, Asian Football Confederation president, Sheik Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa, said he was aware of a movement to have Australia expelled from Asian football. And it’s not just the Gulf nations like Bahrain, 2022 World Cup host Qatar and UAE (who the Soccerroos beat 2-0 this week in the semi final) who want Australia out.

Sheikh Salman Bin Ibrahim al-Khalifa said he was aware of momentum in the AFC for Australia’s removal from Asian football. Salman told Dubai-based newspaper Al-Ittihad that “Arabs are not the only ones” looking to exclude Australia. “Australia joined the AFC before I was elected as the president,” Salman said. “At that time, the AFC general assembly made no resolution about re-assessing Australia’s membership to determine whether it will stay or be evicted. There are indications that prove that such desire exists among the confederations of west Asia to evict Australia. Salman said “There are indications that prove that such desire exists among the confederations of west Asia to evict Australia, but I also know that the Arabs are not the only ones who are not convinced that Australia’s membership in Asia’s football is feasible.”

Salman says he is content with Australia’s involvement in the AFC but says dissenting nations could raise the issue at this year’s general assembly.

In other words, nobody likes us. Or perhaps they just don’t like that we’re successful at this level.

Australia’s involvement in Asian football dates back to the start of 2006, when we left the Oceania conference. As a member of Oceania, Australia had endured super tough qualifying roads to the FIFA World Cup. Every four years we were forced to play the fifth-best qualifier from South America. Every four years, we lost.

Then in 2005, we played Uruguay for a spot at the 2006 World Cup in Germany. The Socceroos famously squeezed through, thanks to Mark Schwarzer magic and that John Aloisi penalty with its shirt-swirling aftermath. It would be the last time we were forced to qualify via South America.

From 2006 onwards, Australia has sought World Cup qualification via one of the four spots reserved for Asian teams. The move has worked. We made it to the World Cup in both 2010 and 2014, and have also performed well at the Asian Cup (although we haven’t won one yet — but that could happen on Saturday against South Korea!)

But Australia’s World Cup qualification success and Asian Cup success has made life tougher for Gulf nations and other football hopefuls in Asia. And despite the 2015 Asian Cup being a fantastically successful, friendly tournament (as you’d expect for any major sporting event hosted here), there are apparently those who want Australia out.

The fiery quotes by Asian football chief Sheik Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalif are not available online. However news.com.au did find on the Al-Ittihad website a piece from a columnist which appears very much in step. It reads:

“Is it time to assess the decision to allow entry of Australia into the AFC system, the question presents itself, and also pointed to achieve yesterday that the relationship between the two parties (Australia and AFC) is nothing more than the love of one party, is the Australian party certainly, private with confirmation of the marketing committee of the Asian continent, that football has not benefited from the participation of Australia.” – Google translated and reviewed for context.

To Australians, this just sounds like sour grapes from the oligarchs of oil-rich Arabian states unaccustomed to not getting things their own way. It is interesting that this is the same oligarchs that let Australia into the AFC, but perhaps they didn’t expect them to be so good. Now they are, they want to change their minds.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, the term Australasia is indicative of the country’s location. If Indonesia is Asian then so is Australia as they are neighbours. Or perhaps FIFA needs to do an overhaul of its confederation membership and World Cup selection procedures.

Following a surprising amount of phone calls to 911 emergency services last night (27/01/2015), East Bay dispatchers near San Francisco are requesting that local residents stop calling in to complain about social media networks becoming unavailable.

Claycord.com reports that following a brief Instagram outage, Facebook also went down, causing panic among several residents.

Facebook’s outage was reportedly caused by an internal glitch, but nevertheless raised concern in the East Bay, prompting five people to call in to ask when the sites would be back online.

“Our lines are dedicated to handling life and death calls, and even though Facebook is important to a lot of people, it’s not a matter of life and death when it stops working,” the dispatcher said. “One caller even called back to tell me I was being rude because I told her it wasn’t a life threatening emergency.”

I used to say only in America, but judging by the type of calls we recieve in Australian emergency call centres, it’s happening here too!

It has never ceased to amaze me how football (soccer, in Australian parlance) has always been the poor cousin of Australian sport. Many other forms of “football” have greater attendances. These include rugby league, rugby union and Australian Rules football.

Football, commonly regarded as “the world game”, although played widely throughout the country at junior levels, fails to attract and support the game at national and international level. The Hyundai A-League has gone some way to putting Australian football on the national stage, but the competition supports only ten teams, and one of those is from New Zealand! I would have thought that ther national competition could have supported more teams. The English Premier League supports 20 teams, 4 other divisions or leagues and two Scottish divisions. Any talented player in Australia must seek an overseas club to play for if they are getting to make a decent living from the sport

Of course all that has changed now that Australia is a finalist in the Asian Cup. Australians are now experts on everything “soccer”, as they throw their “lot” in with the national side. Should they win against South Korea on Saturday next, Australians will see this an excuse for the consumption of large quantities of alcohol, increased absenteeism from work as they enjoy an additional albeit unauthorised public holiday, the sickie.

After a week or so, apathy toward the sport will return, especially as the rugby league season draws near, and national football will again suffer from reduced attendance, and return to its poor cousin status.

Oh dear, oh dear! Tony Abbott has done it again! He had Australians asking this morning (26th January 2015) “Is it Australia Day – or April Fool’s Day?”, when he revealed that Prince Philip, had been awarded a Knight of the Order of Australia, this country’s highest honour.

The 93-year-old Duke of Edinburgh, who has made a string of controversial and memorable gaffes during his wife’s reign, became a trending topic on Twitter in Australia shortly after Mr Abbott announced that he would receive the honour. The online reaction was largely one of disbelief, and far from complimentary, and in fact some thought it to be a hoax.

In particular, critics referred to Prince Philip’s 2002 visit to Australia with the Queen, when he asked an Aboriginal man: “Do you still throw spears at each other?”

Mr Abbott dismissed the criticism, describing the negative reaction on social media as “electronic graffiti”. “I’ll leave social media to its own devices. Social media is kind of like electronic graffiti and I think that in the media, you make a big mistake to pay too much attention to social media,” Mr Abbott said. “You wouldn’t report what’s sprayed up on the walls of buildings.”

Mr Abbott was peppered with questions at an Australia Day function in Canberra about whether there were any Australians who would have been more deserving of the knighthood than a British royal. The conferring of this award has no affect on his position in the royal heirarchy, he is already a duke and a prince.

This Is Me

George Brown is a decorated soldier and health professional and 40 year veteran in the field of emergency nursing and paramedical practice, both military and civilian areas. He has senior management positions in the delivery of paramedical services. Opinions expressed in these columns are solely those of the author and should not be construed as being those of any organization to which he may be connected.

He was born in the UK of Scottish ancestry from Aberdeen and a member of the Clan MacDougall. He is a member of the Macedonian community in Newcastle, and speaks fluent Macedonian. While this may seem a contradiction, it is his wife who is Macedonian, and as a result he embraced the Macedonian language and the Orthodox faith.

His interests include aviation and digital photography, and he always enjoys the opportunity to combine the two. Navigate to his Flickr site to see recent additions to his photo library.